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How to measure the effectiveness of your content marketing

One big quibble people have is that it can be tricky to measure the effectiveness of your content marketing. Because of this, many believe the entire concept isn’t worthwhile. However, this is far from true!

It’s easier than ever before to measure the effectiveness of your content marketing efforts. You just need to know how to go about it … That’s where we come in! So, pencils at the ready, let’s go!

Why do you need to measure the effectiveness of your content marketing?

If you measure the effectiveness of your content marketing, you can prove the impact it has. This will make it easier for people to appreciate its power. It might also help you win a bigger budget for next year!

Accurate measurement can identify where you should make changes in your content strategy. If a certain style or type of content isn’t effective, then ditch it. If another kind comes up trumps, create more content like it and add it to your list for repurposing!

In a nutshell, if you measure the effectiveness of your content marketing you can make informed decisions and gain valuable insights into visitor behaviour. You’ll also increase brand awareness and (eventually) overall revenue … who could refuse that?

2. Choose the key metrics you need to measure

Every content marketer will have a different idea about which KPIs are most important. Luckily for you, HubSpot has created a handy infographic showing the ones you should try to measure the effectiveness of your content marketing.

Here’s a quick list:

Website traffic

Subscriber growth

Search rankings

Time

Social media followers

Social media shares

Links and authority

Click-through-rate (CTR)

Leads

Feedback

Once you have those basics covered, you can pick more specific KPIs that relate to your goal.

For example, imagine your goal is to get 10% more returning visitors to your page. Here, you will need to look specifically at (and measure) returning visitors’ stats.

Once you’ve established your key metrics to measure the effectiveness of your content marketing, create a spreadsheet that lists them. This will come in handy later.

3. Work out how you’re going to measure them

Your first port of call should be Google Analytics – it’s a great source of information. It will give you a wealth of information about your site in an easy-to-read format. Unfortunately, it doesn’t cover everything, so you’ll need to look in other places too.

Most major social media sites have their own in-built analytics platforms. Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn certainly do, but sadly they don’t talk to each other. This means you’ll have to manually add your social KPIs together, or find an app to do it for you.

Plugins can be used to assess links and authority, so shop around for the best one.

Your CMS should be able to track leads, especially if it has user analytics capabilities and talks to Google Analytics. However, if your system isn’t up to scratch (or you don’t have one), this can all be done by hand.

4. Create a baseline

You can’t measure something if you don’t have a starting-point. So, go back to the spreadsheet you created and start filling in the KPI information as it stands today.

This can be in numeric form, or you can include charts and graphs to make it easier to understand. However, remember you’ll have to follow the same format every time you measure the effectiveness of your content marketing, so don’t do overdo it! It can become quite time-consuming.

Your baseline will form the first page in the report where you measure the effectiveness of your content marketing. See, it was pretty simple, right?

5. Measure the effectiveness of your content marketing regularly

There’s no magic formula for how often you should measure the effectiveness of your content marketing. However, you should always keep an eye on your stats, even if you’re not actively reporting on them that day.

We’d suggest doing an official report once a month. That way you’ll gain an accurate overview of how your content is performing and it won’t take up too much of your time.

After a few months, you can collate it all into a neat presentation, show your boss and prove how worthwhile your content marketing strategy is. You can easily measure the effectiveness of your content marketing and you don’t need a degree in statistics to do it! Why not try it today?